Qt and OpenGL for game development

5
votes

I have a few questions about Qt.

  1. I already know that Qt and OpenGL can be used together. At the moment we are using GLUT at my university (for window and input management). I saw that Qt is able to do the same thing. Are there any disadvantages of using Qt instead of GLUT? (performance wise)

  2. I also know that Qt can be used to build a ingame GUI. I even saw this 3d GUI example WolfenQt. So it is possible. But does it make sense to use Qt for an ingame GUI if you care about perfomance?

1
qtopengl
Is there even a 64 bit version of glut for windows? I believe it is no longer in development and is not opensource. QT is a good cross platform toolkit and is still in current development. There's really no reason for comparison. The school's still use glut because it's a popular library for teaching 3D programming not because it provides the best performance. Besides most of the performance will come from opengl not a widget library. – Codeguy007
@Codeguy007: There's FreeGLUT, which is open source and well maintained. And yes there are Win64 builds for it. However I'd not recomment GLUT for a game. Better use SDL or GLFW. – datenwolf

1 Answers

5
votes

Qt, like any other tool can be misused. But just because you use Qt this does not mean, OpenGL performance will suffer. OpenGL doesn't care about what and how its context and the drawable it's bound to are created. The biggest impact Qt has is, how it manages and delivers events; the signal/slots mechanism.